Rating: PG-13
Words: 8,920
Disclaimer: Characters and the initial scenario come from Die Hard 4.0
It was a while before the doctors discharged him. Well, that was inaccurate. It was a while until John McClane was feeling fit enough, and sick enough of the hospital food, that he stepped out when they weren't looking. Five days. It didn't take a man of his talents, either--the hospital was full of the victims of the Fire Sale, the medical staff who weren't victims themselves had been working day and night without rest or relief, haggardly but uncomplainingly trying to fix things. Well, what else were they gonna do? John didn't feel bad about slipping out; he'd had his transfusion, a couple days of the drip, and now he was fit enough to heal himself. The doctors could give their attentions--and his bed--to someone who needed them more.
It hadn't taken the full five days for Lucy to get enough of him and head home to her mother--school hadn't resumed yet. Once the adrenaline, the gratitude, and the concern for her father wore off, her old familiar daughterly disappointment in him had returned and the usual rifts had opened between them. But before she'd gone, she'd hugged him close and told him he was allowed to call her. John smiled to himself as he climbed the stairs to his apartment. That was enough.
He paused on the landing outside his door. It didn't make this home he was coming back to, with dinner on the stove and kids bickering at the table, and someone to keep him warm and fuss over his wounds in bed at night--someone to say he should still be in the hospital, needed to take it easy, was he crazy still risking himself at his age, all that. Not that he listened, but it was nice to hear it, sometimes.
"Eh," he said aloud and shrugged. He turned his key in the lock and pushed the door open.
He had his gun out and his back against the wall before he even processed what had changed inside--from what he could see in the entryway, not too much besides the foreign pair of sneakers on the doormat--and, for that matter, the doormat--and there was a scent in the air... he couldn't place it, but it wasn't the usual one--namely, dust--his apartment breathed. Had there been someone left from Gabriel's operation? Bowman had said they found the rest of the apparent conspirators dead, and it seemed like that was how Gabriel had wanted it--as few informed survivors as possible--but had there been one more, somewhere, who knew the score? Someone with the same ability to locate people wherever they were? Not that the McClane apartment was hard to find...
A few bars of music floated out of the room he used for storage and were rapidly replaced by a rhythmic screaming accompanied by bass and screeching electronic guitar. What the hell was this, assassination by earfuck? Jesus. It made it easier to come up on an intruder undetected, though.
The door to the storage room was ajar. As John crept up on it, avoiding the known squeaky floorboards--unnecessarily, given the decibels of the 'music'--he heard someone moving inside. Sounded like only one person. Hell with it; he was tired and this was his turf they were invading. He kicked the door open and leveled his gun at chest height.
Someone tipped backwards out of a chair that shouldn't have been there, hands in the air. "Don't shoot! Hands are up! I'm unarmed!"
John's face creased in disbelief. Half the person had disappeared behind a high stack of boxes. Most of the room was still boxes, as it should have been, but they were stacked to the ceiling now in some places, clearing a small space around a chair and desk John did not remember, the latter of which was now occupied by a computer tower and monitor, two tall speakers and a stack of discs. A pair of crutches leaned against the wall beside the desk. John leaned around the corner created by one tower of boxes, gun aimed floorward. It was, as the voice had suggested to him and the computer apparatus supported, Matt Farrell sprawled on the floor, legs still tangled up with the chair, hands raised high despite the awkwardness of the position. "McClane!" he gasped. When the gun didn't immediately lower, he amended, "Detective McClane? Sir?" in increasingly panicked tones.
John's expression of incomprehension deepened. He uncocked the gun and holstered it. "Let's stick with McClane. What the hell are you doing here?"
"Long story? Good story. Can I put my hands down?"
John rolled his eyes. "Yeah."
Matt did so, and used them to haul himself into a sitting position. He winced as he did. John noticed the extra-baggy jeans he was wearing which were filled out only at the left shin. "That broken?" John asked, nodding at the leg.
"Huh?" Matt followed his eyes. "Oh, no. Just fractured. Thanks," he added, as John offered him an arm up. He stood on just his right, keeping his left knee bent; he looked conflicted for a moment, then leaned on the desk. "Geez, do you always enter your own house like that?"
"When there's someone else in it, yeah. Now what the hell--?" John raised a hand and shook his head. "No, wait. I need a drink first. I've needed a drink for five days." He went out into the small living-dining room where, he noticed now, there were books he didn't recognize on the small, no-frills dinner table, and made a detour into the entryway to close and lock the door. He went on to the kitchen--a narrow slice of the dining room separated by a chest-high partition. He heard a wooden clatter behind him and crutch-assisted hopping foosteps following. So much for the kid getting to a gym any time soon.
"What the hell did you do to my fridge?" John demanded.
"Oh, uh... well, there wasn't anything in there, so..."
"I know there was beer."
"Well, besides that, and I have low blood sugar..." John didn't need to turn around to see Matt's posture folding in on itself as his voice trailed off. "Sorry? The beer's still in there. I think it's on the bottom shelf." A chair scraped along the floor and there was another wooden sound as Matt propped his crutches against the table and sat down.
The entire refrigerator door and one of the shelves was full of three different colors of Mountain Dew, a few cartons of orange juice and some bottled smoothies. The rest was jammed with take-out boxes and types of snack food John didn't recognize. "Ugh," he said. With the assurance that the beer still remained in there somewhere, he plunged an arm into the morass. "Alright, so how about explaining what the hell you're doing here, cluttering up my apartment and my fridge?"
Matt took a deep breath. "Well, I got out of the hospital before you did, and I checked with the doctors and they said you'd be stuck in there a while longer, and I thought, you know what, I bet McClane left his apartment in a mess, with no food in the fridge, and that'd be lousy to come home to after saving the old U.S. of A. and everything--"
"Yeah, your place blew up, didn't it?"
"There was that."
"It was in Jersey--consider it an improvement."
"Yeah, thanks."
"Insured?"
"No."
"Not even your precious 'gear'?"
A heartfelt sigh. "No."
"Huh. And the FBI..." John shoved aside a couple cardboard Chinese takeout boxes. "They didn't set you up with anything? Damages? You were sorta involved in saving the country. A bit."
"They said I was lucky they were ignoring my contribution of the algorithm instead of throwing me in federal prison for the next twenty years, and if I didn't want them to change their minds, I'd better not tell anyone what really happened."
John finally located a beer in the back of the fridge and straightened up with a creaking of vertebrae. He'd proven he could still take a couple bullets, jump out of cars at high speed, climb out of falling elevators and even ride a crashing fighter jet like a rodeo cowboy, but he was getting older, and there were parts of him bruised, sprained and broken right now that he was pretty sure he hadn't had twenty years ago. He pried the cap off his beer with his thumb and took a pull. "Figures," he said.
"Yeah," Matt agreed mournfully. "So, I didn't have anywhere to go."
John finished his beer before assessing that statement. "You don't have parents?"
Matt frowned and looked away. "No," he said tightly.
John raised his eyebrows, then turned to fish out a second beer. That sounded like not quite a lie, but certainly not the whole story. This time that story wasn't his business, so he let it go. He came out of the kitchen with beer in hand. He pulled a chair out from the dining room table and sank into it, stretching out his legs. "I know you're a little short on common sense, what with all that computer genius stuff taking up space upstairs, but if you were gonna break and enter and squat somewhere, most petty criminals wouldn't've chosen a cop's place."
Matt widened his eyes--going for the cute and innocent look the way Lucy had used to as a kid. About half the time, she'd looked like her mother and it'd worked. The other half, he'd just seen himself, laughed, and told her, essentially, to man up. "I didn't break in!" Matt protested.
John gave him an incredulous look over the beer bottle.
"I didn't! I told the super I was your son, and--" He affected the earnest young man demeanor he'd used on superintendant O.B. Jones--"Dad's so gonna kill me if he realizes I lost the key somewhere. You know how cops are, I mean, like some burglar is really gonna find my keys in the middle of Times Square and figure out they open this apartment, right?" He shut down the big eyes and the pleading tone. "Once I got in, I found your spare key in the junk drawer."
"I don't have a spare..." Junk drawer? That didn't ring a bell either. Unless it was that narrow drawer in the kitchen so filled with outsized detritus it barely opened. It'd been like that since he got the apartment, and he'd never cleaned it out. If there had been a working spare key in there, it meant Jones had lied about changing the locks before McClane moved in. "Son of a bitch," John muttered without energy. There was an extra to-do list item he didn't need. He had time off from the department and a couple holes and dents in him; the to-do list he'd had in mind was blank, or better yet, burnt and buried. "What's your plan, Matt? You were gonna squat here until you found a new job?"
Matt's frown turned petulant, almost into a pout, and his gaze fell to his lap. John was reminded of a sulking cat with his ears down. He repressed a snort at the thought. "That's looking like more of a problem than I thought," Matt said.
John's look prompted further explanation.
"Although we're supposedly keeping my role in this on the DL, all the relevant people seem to know that with me on their payroll they'll have every intelligence agency in the country breathing down their necks."
John gave him an unpleasant smile. "How 'bout that? Time for you to get a new alias, huh?"
"We call 'em handles on the 'Net, McClane."
"No," said John. "It's alias. You're a criminal, remember?"
"I'm not a criminal," Matt said quietly.
"No? How'd you get on the FBI's list in the first place?"
"That was harmless! And I was fifteen. Come on."
John's eyebrows rose. "What'd you do?"
"Allegedly..."
"Right, allegedly..."
"Allegedly, someone hacked into the White House system that controls the security monitors and the bigscreen TVs that are up in some of the rooms for display of historical trivia and that kinda thing, and made them all play gay porn for a half hour."
John snorted beer halfway out his nose. He remembered the incident--over a decade earlier. There had been some low-key news coverage. The White House PR team had jumped on the story early and heavy. The security systems aspect wasn't in the news at all; the prankishness and vulgarity was played up, with a lot of stuffed suits expressing outrage at the desecration of a national landmark in order to divert attention from what might have been a panic-inducing breach of security. "You're shitting me. You did that?"
Matt had the grace to look embarrassed. "Like I said, I was fifteen. I mean, I just wanted to see if I could break into the system, and then... well, I got cocky and wanted to leave something behind, which I should never have done... and I was an asshole, so that was what I left. And who knew they were so proud of that shitty-ass security--really, it was pathetic--that they'd stick me on all the watch lists. It probably didn't help that there was an ambassador from China visiting at the time."
"Well, shit," John said. He drained the last of his beer and set the bottle down with a louder bang than he'd intended. His right arm was giving notice that it couldn't be counted on in a fight. He considered going and rooting around for another bottle, but his own bed, with linens soft from long use instead of the paper napkins the hospital called sheets, free from the smell of antiseptic, exhaustion sweat and death, exerted a sudden and irresistible pull on his mind. He heaved himself out of his chair, unselfconscious about the grunt that escaped him--a decade at least since he'd given a shit about that--and headed for his bedroom. "You didn't do anything to my bedroom I'm gonna need to beat you over, did you?"
"I didn't go in there." Matt collected his crutches and followed.
"Pretty polite for a squatter."
"Listen..."
John pushed the bedroom door open. "Later." His room was as he remembered leaving it, down to the discarded shirt and pants in the corner by the closet and the unmade bed. He'd gotten the impulse to visit Lucy and left with no more preparation than turning out the lights. John tossed his jacket onto the chair in the corner. He slid off his holster and after a moment's hesitation, dropped it on the nightstand. He pulled off his shirt and lobbed it at the existing pile.
"You weren't kidding about the gym."
John turned, expression incredulous. Matt was in the doorway, slumped against his crutches more than he needed to be, watching John with frank interest, as if he were a Discovery Channel program.
"Don't you know not to follow a man into his bedroom?"
Matt blinked. "Most of my friends live in their bedrooms, so... no."
"Well, learn it now, and get out."
"But you didn't let me finish. Wow, you know, I didn't really think that whole barrel-chested body-builder type existed outside comic books, but you're actually--"
"Kid!" John growled. "Go away! Sleep on the couch or--"
"It's four in the afternoon."
"Then go dick around with your computer, or lift one of those boxes a few times, or something. Don't do anything illegal."
"That's... what I'm talking about." Matt's fists were clenched. He was glaring at the floor with an intensity that reminded John of both his kids, when they were so angry they wanted to cry, but refused to give anyone that satisfaction.
"What?" John asked. Really, this wasn't going anywhere good. His kids were grown, now. If he started feeling parental towards everyone their age, he might as well turn in his badge. Was he going to start handing out milk and cookies to every teenage and twenty-something gang member, drug dealer and carjacker? Speaking of--
"Look, the car thing?" Matt was saying. "I... I did do that once before. But it was an emergency. A friend of mine ODed on some shit he was taking for a flu, and was arresting and shit... There wasn't time for an ambulance, and neither of us had a car, and I'd read about tricking the remote assistance operators, and I was desperate." His speech had accelerated till the words knocked into each other at the end. He stopped for breath. "I brought the car back. I couldn't pay for the headlight I broke, but I left what I could spare inside. C'mon, McClane, you broke a few rules last week, yourself."
"As soon as the station's in any state to process it, I'll file the paperwork to get those cars' owners reimbursed."
"How the hell are you gonna tell--?"
John rattled off the license plate numbers of the cars they'd appropriated.
"You gotta be fucking kidding me. You made those up." John lifted his eyebrows and shook his head. "Alright, then, what about the cell phone?"
"Cell phone?"
"You snatched it off that guy at the traffic jam, just before the fake broadcast of the White House blowing up."
John thought back. "Oh. Yeah, that I just threw away."
"Well?"
"It was emergency police business, and he'll probably report it himself. If he doesn't, well... I'm sorry he was out fifty bucks or whatever."
Matt took a deep breath and released it in a frustrated huff. His mouth twisted as if he couldn't decide whether to let out his next sentence. "I've broken other laws online. I've been into other systems I shouldn't've. But I never damaged them, and I never stole from them; I just learned. If I hadn't taught myself and tested myself that way, I'd never have been able to do what I did last week."
"Kinda like the way I learned to do what I did by beating the shit out of cuffed suspects in police holding cells with the cameras turned the other way."
Matt's mouth fell open. His eyes rounded. "You didn't..."
"No!" John growled. He was annoyed that it stung when the kid bought the idea so readily.
The expression of shock on Matt's face shifted to one of betrayal, and now he really did look like he was going to cry. "Fine, I get it. Even after everything that happened, I'm just a criminal to you. Okay." He pivoted awkwardly on the crutches and hopped out of the doorway.
John frowned after him for a moment. He groaned. "Hey. Hey, I said." The clumping footsteps in the hallway halted.
"What?"
"C'mere a second."
Several clumps later, Matt's face peered around the doorframe, brows drawn and lower lip jutting. John nodded towards the nightstand, where his gun sat in its holster. He raised his eyebrows. "See that?"
Matt's eyes followed his gesture, then looked back at John, wary and petulant. "Yeah...?"
"I'm leaving that there and going to sleep. All right?"
Matt's brows pursed. He looked again at the gun, then back at John, and then his face cleared, all the frown lines vanishing, and he smiled like walking from midnight to noon, so wide and honest a smile that it belonged on someone much younger. "Okay," he said. "Sleep well." He pulled the door shut and his footsteps receded along the corridor.
"Fuck," John muttered to himself. It really was time to retire. He'd never be able to arrest another under-thirty. Was there a division somewhere that dealt with only geriatric crime?
When John woke up, he smelled food. Or maybe the aroma was what had woken him. He sat up in bed, began to stretch, then aborted when the motion pulled at least three things that were trying to knit. The knob on the bedroom door turned and the door opened a crack. An eye and a lock of floppy brown hair appeared. "Oh, good, you're awake." The door opened the rest of the way and Matt came in with a thermos in one hand and a sealed take-out tupperware box in the other with two bowls stacked on top of it.
John opened his mouth to say something about barging into a guy's room without asking, then shut it. The first step in quashing these involuntary parental reactions was to stop offering lectures and advice where it wasn't his job to do so. The Twelve-Step Program for Men with Parental Flashbacks. Great.
"I figured you'd be hungry. The food at the hospital was pretty depressing, huh?"
John shrugged. Matt stumped over and handed him the thermos before setting the tupperware and bowls down beside him on the bed. Then he swung himself around to the other side of the bed and sat down. "Make yourself at home," John muttered.
"Hm?"
John shook his head. "I do have a table."
"You should be resting, shouldn't you?" Matt opened the tupperware. Inside were two grilled cheese sandwiches, two spoons and a few sheets of paper towel. Matt spread two of these last near John, two near himself. "You weren't actually discharged, were you?" John gave him a look. "Didn't think so. It's altruistic of you to leave the bed to someone else, and all, but you still oughta take it easy. I'd've been dead three times already if I'd taken all the abuse you did, with a little left over. You may be a tough guy, but if you don't take some time to recover, you'll--"
"Alright, alright," John grumbled. Familiar yet faraway. It seemed like forever since he'd been chided that way by someone who really gave a shit about the result. Matt was sincere--that much John could tell. If only because he'd imprinted on John from having his life saved. That should wear off eventually. In the meanwhile, John could admit to himself that it was good having someone else around right now, when being alone with his healing body would make it harder to remember why his efforts had been worthwhile. It wasn't meant to be this kid, but it was, so why not enjoy his company? He took one of the sandwiches. "What's in the thermos?"
"Vegetable soup."
"Mom's Out, Dad's Cooking menu," John said.
Matt laughed. "Yeah, well. It's a good grilled cheese, though. Promise." He bit into his own, then fumbled to keep from spilling crumbs on the blanket. He raised his eyebrows at the other sandwich, prompting John to start.
John did. He nodded as he brushed the first batch of crumbs away with the back of his hand. "Good enough for a pair of invalids," he agreed.
"Phew," Matt said with an exaggerated sigh. His eyes had a friendly crease to them when he smiled unsarcastically. John found himself smiling back. It'd been about a year and a half since anyone besides him had been in the apartment--that was the last time his son had visited. John had shared the odd meal out with fellow detectives after work, and had a few dinners at their homes, but the last time he'd shared a meal in his own place had been when his son was there.
John mostly listened as Matt went on cheerfully about what was being done to restore emergency power to the eastern corridor after the explosion of the main power hub in West Virginia. Most of the coast was on rationed power; New York City was one of the few municipalities managing to supply 24-hour electricity, though citizens were still being asked to conserve. It was only two days earlier that they had restored the power, so Matt had stocked up on flashlights, batteries and candles, which they were bound to need again--no way they were getting away without a few black- and brown-outs.
"I meant to ask," said John. "How did you buy all that food, and the computer stuff? I'm sure they didn't let you keep the kit you took from the ninja chick."
Matt rolled his eyes. "Noooo, they didn't. The bank systems came back up on a limited basis along with the power on Tuesday. I had some savings, so I took it all out. Yeah," he grimaced. "I know. Don't gimme that look. I feel like a Luddite, but I didn't have that much, and just in case there are a few more hiccoughs in the system..."
"What'd you and your low blood sugar do for the other three days?"
Matt snorted. "Man, I thought I was gonna die. Just sorta lay around comatose for a while. I finally dug out some prehistoric pasta from behind a bunch of cleaning chemicals and Raid and stuff under your sink. That was pretty much it till I could get at my bank account. And I replaced the pasta, by the way, with a new box, in a less toxic cupboard." He looked at the incredulous expression on John's face. "What. Don't tell me that was, like, laced with arsenic and you were gonna put it out for rats or something."
"No... I just don't know why there was pasta back there, I don't think it was mine, and I think you're a crazy motherfucker to be rooting around behind the bleach for food. There had to've been some emergency shelters handing out food that wasn't half-soaked in Raid."
"There were," Matt said. He poured out the soup for each of them and handed John a bowl. "Big long lines. When I went to check it out, it just looked like the people there needed it more than I did. They fed me in the hospital, after all, and some of these people looked like they hadn't eaten for considerably longer than that. Probably not just because of the Fire Sale, either."
John looked at the kid sideways as they each started on their soup. Matt was all right. That is, John had known it already; the kid had proven himself under fire. When the chips were down you found out whether a man was a coward or capable of something more, but even in the latter case, once the danger passed, some guys went back to being schmucks. Matt did see the whole aftermath as a sort of math problem, or computer system issue, and there was an animation to him when he talked about how it was being fixed that might've suggested he found the technical challenge more interesting than the people, but he'd also tightened his belt to let at least one other hungry person eat. Matt wasn't a schmuck. He was still all right. John was pleased to see it.
"You can stay," he said, when he set down his bowl. Matt looked up at him--like that same droopy cat had pricked up its ears at the sound of the can-opener. John held up a hand. "But if you're not going to be paying rent, you're gonna have to learn to cook better than this."
"I'm not joking, McClane. Either go back to the hospital and let them decide, or stay the hell out of my hair for the next two weeks. I don't wanna see you. If I do, I'll shoot you myself. We're handling it."
John jerked the phone away from his ear at the echoing slam Captain Scalvino had given the phone. "Shit," he muttered, and slammed it onto the base on the side-table next to the couch.
"No go, huh?" Matt's voice came from the storage room-cum-study-slash-guest-room.
"I'll go join the volunteer fire fighters or something," John muttered. It had been a few days, and already he itched to be doing something constructive. There was all sorts of reconstruction work to be done. The NYPD had called in all its part-time volunteers, but John's captain wouldn't let him come back in.
"Don't you have two or three broken ribs?"
"So what?"
"And a hole in your shoulder?"
"You got a point?"
"Nah, heavy lifting should be great for that. Go ahead and land yourself in the hospital again, taking a bed away from some other deserving citizen."
"Shit," John said again. It was nice to have someone give a shit, but it could be infuriating to have them talk the sense you were trying to ignore. There hadn't been such a wide-scale, high-volume need for police presence in New York in years, if ever. 9/11 didn't begin to touch it. Non-government security systems were down everywhere, so there was looting. The streetlights periodically went out, leading to a higher incidence of muggings and other street crime. Cars abandoned during the traffic system attack were being stolen and claims were pouring in. Gangs were taking advantage of the chaos to collect protection money, recruit, or kill off rivals while official attention was elsewhere, not to mention the volume of simple accidents caused by no light or sudden loss of power, and even the cases of heatstroke and food poisoning from lack of climate control and spotty electricity killing refrigerators. (At McClane's place, only leftovers and drinks were in the fridge. Almost everything else was dried or canned; Matt had foreseen this.) And in the middle of it all, John was being told to sit around with his thumb up his ass.
John grabbed a beer--the top shelf of the fridge was now dedicated to that purpose--and went into the storage--Matt's--room. "What're you doing while the city goes to hell? Surfing porn?"
"Why, you want some?" Matt grinned up at him. He had a brightly colored soda can in one hand and a dozen empties littered around the desktop and the legs of his chair. He and John--mostly John--had shifted most of the boxes. Now there were two towers of them in the corners of John's room and two more like roof-support pillars in the corners of the dining room. There was just enough space now in Matt's new digs for the desk and chair--which apparently had been in the room before John filled it with crap from his old house--a futon, and a very narrow walkway between the two. One of the boxes remaining in there had been emptied of old Christmas ornaments and was now functioning as Matt's wardrobe.
John took a seat on a two-box stack and looked at the computer screen. The wallpaper was a picture of some band whose lead singer--male or female was anyone's guess--stood in the foreground screaming at the camera. Over it, several translucent windows were filled with gibberish--some stationary, some rapidly scrolling. "If that's your idea of porn," said John, "no, thanks." He thumbed off the cap of his beer, which knocked over one of the empty Mountain Dew cans on the floor.
Matt glanced back at him and winced. "What do you have against bottle openers?"
John shrugged.
"You're kind of a show-off, you know."
"Look who's talkin', genius boy. So what is that?"
"You wanna see?" Matt stretched his right arm out, shook his sleeve back with a flourish, and made a few unnecessarily wide swoops with the mouse as he shut two windows onscreen and opened two more.
A browser opened first, turning by default to some forum where Matt got a lot of his news, swearing it was God's honest truth because it came out of his Internet buddies instead of the news media. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, John thought--a lot of bullshit either way--but Matt pulled up another URL and pushed his chair back so John could see. "Voilą," he said.
The page that came up was designed in shades of light blue and green. In the top left corner was a logo of several chunks of glistening ice moving down a stylized swoosh of blue river. Next to it, block letters drawn with an icy reflective sheen read, IceFloe. Under that, in smaller white letters: Cutting Edge Protection Against Malicious Invasion. Below, the page heading read, Protect Your Data, Protect Your Systems, Protect Your Future.
"It's not live yet," said Matt. "But what do you think?"
"Virus software?"
"It does that, too, yeah, but this is geared towards detecting invasion--by bots or hackers--and dealing with the threat. Going up against Gabriel gave me a few ideas, and this is going to be the best anti-hack software ever written. Short of having your own team of specialists, this'll be the best thing out there. Not even WAR10CK will be able to crack this. I swear, he's gonna flip!" Matt clicked on another window and the program's start screen came up, with logo and setup options. "It's going to be good. Great. I've really hit it this time--I'm sure." The kid was beaming like a lighthouse.
"I thought no one would hire you."
"They're not gonna need to. I'll sell it myself off the website. Low price, so it can compete with the free programs--but this'll be so much better it'll be able to, especially after the Fire Sale."
"That's a bit..."
"Ingenious?"
"Mercenary," said John.
"No, it's not. It's well-timed. People's minds will be on this problem, and rightly so--they've seen what can happen. And I'm not just talking here. Abroad, too. This is gonna be a necessary thing. Essential services worldwide are gonna need protection, and I can give it."
"For a price."
"A low one. I'll put out the partial beta for free. That'll be the virus/worm protection with the Farrell firewall. Upgrade to the full anti-hack version for three bucks."
"Three bucks?" John's eyebrows rose.
"It'll be good enough to make some money, even at that price. You'll see."
"You putting your name on the site?"
Matt sighed. "Not for now. An alias. Still." He smiled. "Then I'll be able to contribute something besides tuna casserole to our combined survival attempt." He didn't turn back to the screen immediately; instead he watched John expectantly with those big, dark eyes, like a cat who'd just dropped a nice, grisly rat corpse on the pillow and was awaiting approval.
John landed a hand heavily on Matt's head and ruffled his hair. "Good boy."
Matt hunched his shoulders, but didn't duck away from the assault. His eyebrows unbalanced and he smiled lopsidedly, seeming to struggle with the choice between annoyance and pleasure. "What's that for?"
"Thought that's what you were waiting for." John gave the kid's head a last, vigorous ruffle, then desisted. "It's good," he said. "A good idea. I hope it works."
"It'll work," Matt said. His eyes glittered with purpose. There was a confident set to his jaw. This was Matt's arena: this was where he could fight the good fight. He didn't serve and protect the same way John did, but the drive was the same, and it was all too clear that Matt's way was needed, too. John felt a surge of pride. It didn't quite fit--Matt wasn't his kid. Someone else had raised him with these values; John just happened to be around when they came into play.
John wasn't sure how to treat the relationship forming here. He wondered if his kids would be jealous. But they were independent--if they needed him, they'd let him know, but for now they didn't--and Matt didn't have parents--whether they were dead or just not talking--so maybe there was nothing wrong. You did the job that presented itself, because you were there and had that power. So... that was that.
If he thought Matt was cute when he was enthusiastic and motivated, it was the foster-father thing kicking in and he'd just have to deal with it.
Except for the news, everything on TV was reruns, as production of all American shows had halted during the power rationing. John had dozed off in front of Starsky and Hutch around noon. When the TV went silent, he blinked awake, expecting to find Matt standing in front of the set, protesting about ancient entertainment and pine cones. Instead, he got complete darkness and a quiet curse from Matt's room.
John squinted at his watch, but it was analog without so much as glow in the dark numbers. "Lose everything?" he called out.
"Nah," Matt answered with a sigh. "My backup gives me sixty seconds before my rig goes down with the rest of New York City. I just didn't wanna stop there."
"What time is it?"
"Eleven thirty-six."
"You been at it the whole time?"
"Yep."
"Done yet?"
Matt laughed. "I'm just anticipating the M.O. of every hacker in the world. Gimme a couple more days."
"What a let-down."
A dull light appeared from around the corner, flickered, then died. "That one's dead," Matt said. There was a bump of crutches and his voice got closer. "You hungry?"
"Yeah. Let's go out."
"Really?" Matt's voice issued from just above him. When John looked, he could make out the barest silhouette. There was very little light coming in from the street, which meant the street lamps had gone and only those few businesses and private homes with generators were still casting any light on the city. The price of gas was hovering around seven dollars a gallon, so even those with generators used them sparingly.
"Yeah. There's a twenty-four-hour diner with a generator a few blocks away. Can you make it?"
"Sure." There was a touch of uncertainty in Matt's voice. "We'll atrophy if we hole up here too long."
The streets were surreal. The light from a few windows or signs shone sickly down on an unfamiliar New York. The main streets had been cleared of vehicles, but the side streets, like those outside John's Brooklyn apartment, were still littered with cars where they had crashed or been abandoned. Even if people knew where their cars were, it wasn't always possible to extract them from the blocked streets they occupied. Driving anywhere was still a gamble, anyhow. The highways were passable, but inside the city, it was pointless. The subway was mostly restored, so the city still clicked along, just with more pedestrians than usual.
At night, though, the city was a ghost of itself. Most of what constituted New York City nightlife was gone--restaurants, movies, clubs, Broadway. A good chunk of the population who usually patronized the leisure industry had evacuated, anyway. Those remaining were the optimists, the opportunists, and those with no choice.
The block John's apartment stood on was nearly empty of people when he and Matt emerged. There were sirens audible in the distance, but otherwise, an uncharacteristic hush held the area. Neither of them were moved to break it.
John shortened his stride and hung fire at every step to let Matt keep up; the kid had gotten the hang of the crutches, but the sidewalk littered with uncollected trash made a challenging path for him. Matt usually talked to fill silences like these; John attributed his silence to the exertion of navigating the obstacle course in near darkness. They had gone two blocks before Matt said, "Looks like Beirut."
John looked at him sidelong. Not very revealing given the light. "Beirut?"
Matt snorted. "It's the capital of--"
"I know what it is," said John. "You must've been in diapers when that was still getting air time."
"I was," said Matt. They covered a couple more yards before he said, "That was my parents' word for everything fucked up. They were religious six o'clock news-ers, and, I guess, young and impressionable around the time they were new parents and that was on the screen all the time. I didn't even know what it meant most of my childhood. I just heard them say it, like, 'that foreclosure is turning into Beirut,' or 'our new facility looks like downtown Beirut.' I thought it was fictional, like Hell or Kingdom Come, or something--just a figure of speech. I had a mental picture sorta similar, with flames and dead trees and lots of traffic."
"Your Hell had traffic?"
"We used to commute an hour and a half each morning to where they worked and put me in daycare."
John snorted.
"I looked up some of the footage later," Matt said. "You know, with the bombed out apartment buildings like half-broken eggshells, and people strafing each other over cars in the downtown, hitting all sorts of random shoppers and people chilling out in restaurants and shit. It was worse than what I'd imagined." He paused and gazed up at the apartment buildings that turned the street they walked along into a dark valley. In a ray of pale light streaming up from the next street, a billboard of an underwear model, spray-painted into performing a misdemeanor, leered down at them. "This looks like it," Matt said.
"Nah," said John. "No blown up buildings around here. No bullet holes in the walls. Not many, anyhow. It's just Brooklyn."
"Brooklyn with no trash collection, no light, no..." Matt shut his mouth with an audible click of teeth.
"No what?"
"Never mind."
John waved a hand to indicate a turn onto a less shadowed street. At the far end of it, a lone, lit sign announced a Mobil station. Matt looked up at it. "Go figure," he muttered.
A man, a woman, and a girl of maybe twelve came out of a building and passed alongside Matt on the sidewalk. John turned to watch them go, noting the way the parents flanked their daughter, matching their strides to her shorter ones. Where were they headed this late, in the middle of a blackout? He considered offering to escort them. The man and woman linked hands behind the girl's back. John half smiled and turned away. Matt was watching them, too. The Mobil sign behind him cast his face into opaque shadow; all John could discern was the way Matt's head was tilted down and his hair fell into his face. As soon as John saw him, Matt turned clumsily and continued on his way.
"Left ahead," John said.
"Right."
The diner came into sight. Its lights were on, and a few people were sitting on the curb or leaning against the wall outside, smoking. Matt's outlines beside John became clearer; he went from shades of grey to color as they approached the pool of light at the end of the block.
"They liked all that fifties and sixties shit you like," said Matt, and now John could see his eyes narrow and his mouth twist down at the corners as he spoke. "CCR, the goddamn Spoonful, The Mamas and the Papas, the fuckin' Beatles..."
"Hey, I'm not a Mamas and Papas fan."
Matt gave a short, strained laugh. "They didn't even listen to eighties stuff in the eighties. It was all that folksy 'classic rock' bullshit, all the goddamn time. Jesus. I can't stand that shit."
Matt's crutches touched the outer edge of the diner's yellow aura and he heaved himself into the light. His lips were tightly pressed together, and the tendons in his neck stood out. There was a hard gleam in his eyes as he stared forward.
"I spent a year in Juvie after that White House stunt."
Now John turned to look straight at him.
"When I got out, my parents had divorced. They split custody of me till I was eighteen, shunting me between Camden and Newark weeks and weekends, but neither of 'em wanted me around. I was the little criminal who'd turned the family into downtown Beirut. The burnt-out buildings, the bullet-drilled storefronts of their marriage: that was all me. I did that. Me and my fucking computer.
"I pulled my life back together, just me and my computer, too. I got into RIT, I got college loans, and I paid 'em off with programming prizes and IT jobs and my first search algorithm which I sold to HotBot of all fuckin' places. But I couldn't put their marriage back together once I'd broken that. I couldn't fix my family, and I can't fix this."
Before John could respond, Matt took a deep breath and released it. "Man, I'm starved," he said, putting on some speed to reach the diner's front entrance. "I hope they managed to keep some eggs fresh. I'm dying for an omelette and a stack of pancakes, how 'bout you? Hash browns, too."
The diner had managed to supply itself well. Matt got his midnight breakfast, complete with pancakes bathed in maple syrup. John had a steak and potatoes--very welcome after making do with protein that came out of cans. Matt had mastered the art of talking while eating--he kept up a constant stream of talk while never seeming to leave his mouth empty--presumably another talent of the super-genius. He talked about food at first--it was a topic the recent shortages and lack of refrigeration had made substantially more interesting to both of them. Then to keep the conversation light, John asked what Matt usually did for fun when he wasn't dicking around with computers. He got a longer lecture on modern comic books than he'd ever wanted, but to keep Matt going, John opined that DC was better than Marvel, Batman much cooler than Spawn, and that comics had been better in the fifties. After that last, all he had to do was sit back; it would have taken a body blow to shut down Matt's diatribe, which included artist and award names and issue numbers. Another day, John would have provided the necessary blunt trauma, counting it legitimate defense of his own sanity, but just then, he wanted to keep his own thoughts off what it must've been like for a skinny little geek-boy, who got winded by a couple flights of stairs, with the kind of kids who went to Juvie these days.
Their walk home was quiet. The light from the diner blinked out behind them. The last few customers went in other directions and John and Matt met no one else. The power was still out when they arrived at the apartment; it wasn't a high priority to restore it at night, when it was cooler and businesses were closed. Matt took a luke-warm soda from the fridge, dumped the tupperware of leftover pasta, muttered that he was turning in and disappeared into his room.
John took a beer and retired to his own. He knocked the drink back, stripped to his boxers and undershirt and lay down on top of the sheets--it was a still night and his open window did little to lower the temperature, which hovered around seventy-five despite the hour.
He was wide awake, thanks to his earlier nap. He thought again about Matt in Juvie. His offense had been nothing but a prank, really. Plenty of kids tagged, or covered walls with obscene graffiti. If they craved danger, they climbed over railroad tracks or hung off the sides of bridges to do it. Matt was a computer genius. His version of being a daredevil was to challenge a government system, to hack the unhackable--or what ought to've been--and leave his teenage male mark. It was illegal, not to mention stupid, to climb up a building with a spray can, but no one spent a year in Juvie for it. Matt's biggest crime had been a moronic choice of adversary. There were just some people you didn't fuck with.
And his parents... hadn't they seen that it was no worse than what most teenagers got up to? Even if it had been, was that a reason to treat your own son like a criminal? John was a cop, and still there was nothing Jack or Lucy could've done to make him turn them away. He was responsible for them. If they fucked up, then so had he. It was a parent's job to forgive and repair. You didn't just declare your child a loss and move on.
John eventually dozed off. He opened his eyes an hour and a half later when a chill breeze sliced into the room. The night had finally turned cold. He rose, shut the window, then remembering those left open in the living room, stepped out into the hallway.
Matt's door was open. As John approached, he could see the deep brown rectangle of the window, a lighter shade of darkness, and a black silhouette in front of it, leaning with both hands on the sill.
John stopped in the doorway. "Thought you were turning in."
Matt startled at his voice, but didn't turn away from the window. "Me, too," he said. "Couldn't get to sleep. I'm more of a night person. Not as much fun to be a night person with no electricity."
"Guess not."
"There might not be any more night people."
John raised an eyebrow.
"Look at this, McClane," Matt said. John joined him at the window, standing on the futon. Matt was resting his forehead against the glass. It was too dark to see his face. The rooftops outside stretched away from them, dark grey fading to blackness after only a couple of streets. Here and there in the distance, a lone lighted window cast a circle of grey existence amidst the vast expanse of nothingness. "Is this New York?" Matt asked quietly.
John wasn't sure what to answer. It was a lonely view, all right, but it was only dark; not, you know, on fire, or anything.
"What if it gets worse, McClane? What if the lights just stay off?"
"They're rebuilding the station in West Virginia. In the meanwhile they're trying to set one of the others up to do the same job."
"Yeah," said Matt, in the same funereal tone.
"It'll take longer than they say it will, yeah," said John. "But eventually it'll happen. It's not the apocalypse. It'll get back to normal."
"That's probably what they said in Beirut after the civil war. 'Now we can go back to being a city again. We'll patch up the buildings and get back to business.' Know what actually happened?"
"Yeah," said John. "I do read the news." He would've added, "What's your hard-on for Beirut," but geniuses apparently also stuck hard to their metaphors.
"Huh, the news," Matt muttered. He was silent for a while, then turned around as if he couldn't bear the landscape any longer. He slid down the wall to sit on the futon. "What if it gets worse?" he asked again.
"What could happen? We got Gabriel."
"We're vulnerable right now. What if someone else... What if something else..."
John shrugged. "If we have to kick someone else's ass, we will."
"Heh. Just you and me, huh?"
"Sure." John sat down next to Matt. "Be good if it could wait till you can walk and my shoulder closes up, but who can pass up a challenge?"
Matt uttered another incredulous, nervous laugh. "It might not be that simple."
"Eh."
"McClane," Matt said quietly, "you don't understand. If the lights go out for good... If our communications networks really go down, everywhere, for keeps..."
"Matt," John interrupted. "All you gotta do is go a couple states west. The power's been back at a hundred percent in the central and western corridors for days. Aside from a few traffic accidents still to clean up, and a few more cases of paranoia, they're completely back to normal. The whole rest of the world didn't even blink. They're online just like they were two weeks ago."
"If it happened once... I mean, it doesn't even have to be the same way. It was relatively non-violent this time, even though it didn't look that way at our end: no nukes, no ICBMs, no machine guns in the streets."
"There was a bomber on the highway."
"See?"
"Forget that," said John. "What's the point of getting worked up over this shit before it happens?"
Matt leaned his head back against the wall and sighed. "I don't have any other skills. I'm good with math and computers and that's it. In a post-apocalyptic scenario, I'm the guy they'd eat once the SPAM ran out."
John snorted. "I won't let 'em eat you, kid."
"You might as well," Matt said. "You turn out the lights and I cease to exist." He pointed at the computer. "Without that, I'm nothing. I'm useless. I've got nothing to offer anyone."
The room went silent. There was no sound outside. The silence deepened the darkness, made it easy to think that maybe it was the same everywhere, the rest of the well-lit world was just a fiction, and there was nothing left but the old cop and the kid whose whole identity had been torn away from him.
But it was an adult's worry, wasn't it, not a kid's? Matt's nightmare was not pain or isolation, but being of no use to others. He didn't get that anyone who did worry about that didn't have to; there was always a job to do, always someone to help if you were willing. It would sound like an empty platitude, so John didn't say it. Instead, he hooked an arm around Matt's shoulders and pulled him against his side. Matt lay his head on John's shoulder, then turned to press his forehead against it.
"Lights'll be on in the morning," John said.
--Utopian Trunks
December 25, 2007